


Only An Angel

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Love, M/M, Theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-11-02 01:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20568104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is an effort to try to experience 6000 years of angel-ing through the eyes of Our Angel. Worried, fretful, sometimes bitchy, uncertain Aziraphale who fights so hard to remain loyal to Heaven, even when you can see it costs him. Aziraphale who, as Michael Sheen points out, is about love. Can't help loving--even can't help loving his demon.Even when everything he "knows" insists it's wrong. Even when he has no reason to be very sure he's loved back...or is allowed to enjoy that.So. An experiment in seeing through his eyes. With just enough narrative to provide a hopeful ending.





	Only An Angel

He is so tired. He has stretched himself so far—and there’s no sign he’ll ever be free to stretch himself less.

It’s the “love thing.” The angel creed. The one that somehow all Heaven seems to ignore with impunity, but Aziraphale can’t. Gabriel and Michael and all the entire Celestial lot of them seem to do just fine despising pretty nearly everything She Made. He can’t.

It’s part duty. Sometimes, when the blood runs red and the widows are crying and the blood of babies is painted on the church walls…sometimes he has to gird up his loins and love like an angel, with all God’s grace wrapped around him like an aegis, and his jaw set and his lower lip quivering so he has to tuck his mouth tight and pray that “ineffable” means, “it’s going to be all right—it’s going to mean something good in the end, it’s going to make all the pain worth it, even for the ones who suffered that pain.”

It’s part inescapable longing. When he sees a father pick up his daughter and sing to her about how much he loves her—no matter what she becomes. How she will always be safe with him…

The hope he means it combines with the radiant knowledge that he wants to mean it, the beauty of two more of Her Children, radiating Her Love toward each other. It opens a spring somewhere inside him, whether he wants to love or not, and it just pours out. A sort of invisible holy water, flooding over them, washing them with Her Grace.

(May I be an instrument of your peace… He remembers Brother Francis—the First Brother Francis—and the birds. Swept away with the beauty of birds, the love rising up, knowing this is how She Meant it to be: like entire cascading rivers, rock pool spilling into rock pool, waterfall into waterfall into waterfall of joy and love and kindness…)( Which is all well and good when he’s not so tired. So very tired. Because so often it doesn’t work that way…Or the father kills his daughter when she’s twenty years old and loves the wrong person, because “honor.” Because the idiot thinks God loves honor more than she loves daughters and sons and wives and husbands. Because he’s so weary and it hurts so often.)

Book are easier. It almost works the right way with books. Humans put so much of their beauty there…and so much less of their viciousness. And they try to line it up so it makes sense. They try to do what he can only pray that God will do: make it all make sufficient sense that even those hurt will accept and think it was all worth it.

In books, he can almost close off the memory of all the dead who died too early, for stupid reasons, for “natural” reasons, for ineffable reasons. The dead bobbing in the river after the flood, bloated with intestinal decay, stretched tight under a tropical sun beating down. In books he can almost ignore the wars and the battle fields and the ravens on the corpses.

And when he can’t, he can wrap himself in the beautiful effort the humans make to turn it into something that makes sense. Even the absurdists, even the surrealists, all the different folks who have given up on God, on any notion of religion, who shout that the meaning is only what people make of it—even they turn around and try, as weak, limited humans, to then make it mean something that makes up on some level for all the pain. For the war-shocked men and the raped women and the sick babies, for the child eaten by a leopard, for the slave girl eaten by the Nile by a crocodile, for the barefoot boy bitten by a cobra, for the indigenous family wiped out by incoming foreigners who believe this is God’s Manifest Destiny for them, for all the little hurts and enormous horrors. The humans, even the unbelieving humans, stand athwart the wiles of a cruel universe and resist. Impose love. Scream meaning. Cling to the hope that if even one of them is still fighting, it will somehow turn out to be ineffably worth it in the end.

It is a comfort. Perhaps not so great a comfort as a simple cup of cocoa, or tea on a cold morning, or a beautiful plate of sushi composed by a brilliant chef. But it is a comfort.

And through it all, the directive rapes him open, ravishes him with hope and love and grace, tears the worshipful adoration out of him. He is an angel. He loves.

And loves.

And loves.

He is grateful. God has granted him, in her mercy, a quiet little bookstore in Soho. A human corporation that may be a bit soft, a bit plump, a bit Pooh-ish—but which tastes the glory of a perfect treacle tart, smells roses at dawn, sees the ocean and gasps.

She has granted him his…whatever. With the Demon—Crowley, whom he increasingly believes is as much Hers as he himself is.

(May he be an instrument of Your peace…)

But he grows tired, even so. He bleeds love out constantly. (And why, God, are Gabriel and Michael and Uriel and Sandalphon and Metatron and all the rest free to hate with impunity? Can’t someone else carry this cross a little way?)

(The demon, he remembers, looks with shocked, hurt eyes, and says, “Not the kids? You can’t kill kids!” You can see it hurt him. He carries the cross, too…)

Is it only them? And only because they’re stationed here, able to watch it all go by, the beauty and the horror, the confusion and the stuff that just doesn’t seem to match what Heaven and Hell are so sure is “The Written Plan”?

The truth is sometimes, in his secret heart of hearts, where God can see it and shame him, but no one else can know…

He wishes that somewhere there was someone to love him. Just a bit. Besides God. She pours out her love for so many, he has a hard time believing she sees him and lights up. That when her attention crosses his existence, some part of Her says, “Aziraphale!” or that She quickly rearranges Her schedule to spend a little extra time with him, because She Loves Him. But he’d settle for a proxy. For someone to feed him Her peace, Her grace, the way he pours peace and grace and love out over Her Creation.

Someone who, seeing him, brightens and thinks, “Aziraphale!” and is just a little happier, a little more blessed than he or she was before seeing him.

If he is honest with himself, he wishes it were the demon. His demon. He knows he’s not supposed to want that. He’s an angel. Crowley’s a demon. They’re hereditary enemies. “Two houses, both alike in dignity…” Hatfields and McCoys. Star-crossed…whatever. But there is no other who warms him quite the same way, who laughs at his little jokes, who endures his enormous failings, who shares his understanding of this peculiar Creation she has made, who eats with him (however sparingly), who drinks with him (however outrageously), who teases him and tempts him and draws him out of his bookstore and gossips with him and makes sly clever jokes of his own that keep him chuckling when he’s alone at night sipping his cocoa and contemplating the terrifying enormity of the world.

There is no one else.

Without the demon, he is alone. There is no one else who seems to love as he loves—odd though it is in a demon.

He must be Her Demon. He must, somehow, be in her ineffable plan.

(Sometimes he prays to her, at night, when the demon is at home in his own flat, sleeping the blissful sleep of the wicked. He prays, “Please, God, let him be part of Your Plan. Let him be Your Demon…even if that’s as close as he will ever be to being My Demon. Let me be an instrument of your mercy, God—to him. Forgive him. Care for him. Cherish him.”)

He knows when he prays that it’s greedy and selfish. That She could smite him. That she probably should smite him. But he is what he is—and he is made to love. Is it his fault that the one set to be Earth’s Demon, as he is Earth’s Angel, calls that love with so much power? Breaks his heart and heals it time and time again? Tempts him?

He’s an angel.

He would argue he has no choice—no free will. But that’s been an oxymoron since just before the Fall, when she proved absolutely that angels could do wrong. Choose wrong. Ask the wrong Questions. Come up with the wrong Answers.

(Please, make it make sense. Somewhere in your ineffable plan, let it make sense—so much sense it washes away the hurt and shock and doubt and fear and the sick feeling as I saw them fall, as I raised my sword on Gabriel’s command to my brothers and sisters in Her Creation, please make the good and the evil come out right, and the pattern prove worthy, and the deaths and the destruction and the loss and the mourning, please, Lady-Lord, please, make it mean enough. Please.)

(And please, let me love him, even if he doesn’t love me.)

(Please…)

He wanted to be loved back, though he didn’t dare pray that at all. All the rest he dared pray. That final, greedy, needy prayer he held back, knowing She heard it anyway.

The other angels in heaven would be certain it was wrong—to want to see serpent eyes shine with affection, to want to feel hands caress his wings, preen and puck and tidy his feathers, smooth his brow, share his wine, hold him tight when things hurt too much. They would be quite certain God would be even more horrified than they would be.

Until just recently, he’d suspected they were right. But—

She had not smitten them for standing against Armageddon. She had not rained down death to punish them for loving Her Earth, Defending Her People, Fighting alongside…Her Antichrist?

Was Adam Hers, as Lucifer was, of necessity, Hers? As they were all Hers, born from Her Creation?

In any case, she’d let them live. And let them trick Heaven and Hell. And for the first time in Time itself, he hoped.

(Let him be mine to love, God? And let me be his?)

He was just a lonely angel, and he was stretched so thin. He tried so hard. Maybe not hard enough. Maybe he hid in his bookstore too much. Maybe he failed to take action often enough. Maybe he was too vulnerable to that Demon and his wiles. But—oh…

(Please, God. May we be instruments of your love…)

The little shop bell rang. He looked up, unaware of how his face lit, his eyes shone, his smile lifted.

“Crowley!” he said, setting aside time in his schedule to spend just with his demon.

And his demon smiled, behind black sunglasses, and said, “Aziraphale! Long time no see, angel! What about an hour or two feeding the ducks?”

(If it was not God's answer to his prayer—he chose not to know. He was an angel, and he loved…)


End file.
